[Fedora-packaging] [RFR] Handling of %doc files

[Ville Skyttä]

On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 06:47 -0600, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Enrico Scholz wrote:
> 
> >>Therefore, I suggest one of the following rules:
> 
> >>(a)  %doc files MUST not introduce new dependencies, or
> > ok, I wrote an 'rpmlint' check for this rule:
> > Example output:
> > | $ rpmlint openvpn-2.0.5-1.fc4.i386.rpm 
> > | E: openvpn %doc file '/usr/share/doc/openvpn-2.0.5/sample-scripts/auth-pam.pl' creates additional dependency '/usr/bin/perl'
> > | E: openvpn %doc file '/usr/share/doc/openvpn-2.0.5/sample-scripts/verify-cn' creates additional dependency '/usr/bin/perl'
> 
> Excellent work and suggestion.  I agree with your proposed addition to 
> rpmlint.

Me too, thanks, and will do.  However, if included as is, I'm inclined
to make the message a warning instead of an error and soften the
phrasing a bit because of two things:

The check doesn't do recursive depsolving (nor do I think it should),
ie. it will generate noise about things pulled in by other dependencies.
While strictly speaking this is not noise but the real thing, in
practice packagers rely on deps pulling in things even if the software
_directly_ requires something itself (not at all limited to doc files),
so this would be seen as noise by many folks.  I don't have that strong
opinions on this though, we're talking about a lint tool anyway.

The other thing is that the check strips versions from dependencies
altogether, while in a perfect world it should evaluate them against
other dependencies in the package and see if it is really a new one (for
example, let's say a Perl script in /usr/bin results in a perl >=
0:500503 dependency, but a %doc file adds a perl >= 1:5.6.1 one -> no
message emitted, but should be).

Thoughts?  Enrico, did you send this upstream already?